le choc de 2006, démographie, croissance, emploi (The Coming Shock of 2006: Population, Growth, Employment)

Citation

Richardson, J.G. (2003), "le choc de 2006, démographie, croissance, emploi (The Coming Shock of 2006: Population, Growth, Employment)", Foresight, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 54-55. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680310476276

The 14th book of one of France’s prime futurists is prompted by the spectre that the country’s total population, retiring in only three years’ time, will suddenly nearly double the previous year’s departures from the workforce. For the first time, those reaching the canonical age of 60 will immediately become the charges of the employed generations following. This book is exceptionally topical in France: protest demonstrations, beginning in 2001, culminated in February 2003, with 111 street demonstrations throughout the country in a single day.

The economy of France is today the world’s fourth largest, with a productivity rate higher than any in the European Union. Yet unemployment remains high (9.5 percent in 2002) as does legislated time off (five paid weeks). So reminds Godet, a member of Foresight’s editorial board. Some workers are highly productive, while many others are not. And when Lionel Jospin’s socialist government decreed a 35‐hour week a few years ago, this did not help to – as it was intended – open new jobs or strengthen the economy. Nor, adds Godet, is cheap labour abroad to blame.

To be succinct, economist and engineering‐school professor Godet says that his country is simply not moving ahead. There is little point in blaming this on globalization (“globalization is not a safety net”), he stresses, or on the expanding European Union, or on technologial evolution. When the retirement‐benefits crunch comes in 2006 it will be because of wastage accumulated over decades of “dead‐reckoning” guidance of the economy: mismanagement of social security benefits (too generous), and an absence of political willingness to prepare for the moment of massive retirement by the baby‐boomer generation.

Critic Godet picks on the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and its artificially high subsidies – as in the USA – for crops such as cotton as one of the problem’s roots. The subsidy per kilo is higher than its retail sales price. African farmers, producing respectable cotton, cannot penetrate such protected markets. (And if coffee and cocoa were not tropical yields, a parallel situation would apply to such crops from the north‐temperate zone.)

Who’s to blame? Not only feckless political leadership (including 21 years of socialist dominance, Godet states), but the failing family. Godet blames parental irresponsibility. Family structure had long been the rack‐and‐pinion of French societal machinery, but irresponsibility is to blame for the 20 percent level of functional illiteracy afflicting primary‐school leavers today. Insouciant parents, failing to insist on performance in the classroom, have left teenagers incapable of competing on the job market. Unemployment is now built‐in to the maturing generation.

Some solutions? Attaching new value to family life is one, whereby parents (especially fathers) assume roles of example and leadership, strongly influencing the motives of their young. From there it is a hop, skip and jump to encitement to self‐employment, and the creation of small or medium enterprises – an initiative long lost – outside the craft services, in France.

While Godet’s book is oriented to one country and the resolution of some of its socioeconomic issues, decision makers in other countries would do well to note this courageous approach to how to make things better in an ambience of growing competition.